


The Mind is More Than Identical Numbers

by ivanolix



Category: Battlestar Galactica (2003)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Character Study, Gen, Gen Fic, Wordcount: 1.000-5.000
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-07-04
Updated: 2009-07-04
Packaged: 2017-10-22 03:01:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,408
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/233031
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ivanolix/pseuds/ivanolix
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Leoben knows he's not supposed to be different from his brethren Twos, but Cavil was wrong when he said they were just copies.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Mind is More Than Identical Numbers

**Author's Note:**

> This fic is the answer to a lot of questions I had. How did Sam know about human Cylons in "Resistance"? And why did he practically quote Leoben? Why do we never see more than one Two interact with Kara? Why do the Twos we see not around Kara seem pretty reasonable? Why does Leoben look strangely at Sam in LDYB? In thinking about them, I suddenly found myself viewing the Leoben we think of when we think of the character (a little creepy, stalkerish, cruel) as possibly the Boomer or the Caprica of the Twos. A little more damaged than the "base model", and so doing things in a less-than-ideal way, and maybe not the way the base model would have.

“The skies meet the deer, a child of pain.”

It was the third time the Hybrid had said those words, and Leoben noticed.

“Hands never at rest, never at peace, dealing out pain like masks and illusions.”

His brethren thought they referred to the same person, and Leoben wondered if it were true.

“Lessons of a mother failing like mortality but the words stream to god.”

He was almost sure. There was more, and he thought he could put it all together. It was what he did. It was how he served God.

But the cleansing was coming; one of the Sixes had it all in place. You will be among the survivors, Leoben, Cavil had told him. You must wait to seed more destruction. Cavil had a ship all ready for him, to be in the right place at the right time. He would not be able to speak to God, nor hear the Hybrid’s words, as he mingled with the Colonials. But they all sacrificed for God’s plan.

ooo

The words were all that kept him, alone in the dark storage compartment on a ship barely surviving. Another of his brothers had been found, his face now known to the Fleet. It took him weeks to come across a way to fulfill his purpose. Weeks of telling himself the same words.  
 _  
A soul escaping its destiny, calling for home that is not so, calling for gods of hunt and love, none will answer.  
_  
Once he heard the radio, heard frantic voices. Heard the name, “Starbuck”.  
 _  
The skies meet the deer.  
_  
And so his listening was not in vain.

He couldn’t wait for the proper time, he might go mad if he went over the words one more time. So he bluffed, and prayed, and God delivered Starbuck unto him. The one the Hybrid had heralded so many weeks ago, in so many words and ways.

She grinned at him, her hair and uniform a mockery of the person he saw inside. All he knew of her was so much deeper than that. The words mixed in his head, and he gave them to her the wrong way. She didn’t hear. She couldn’t see the stream like he could.

He forgot that she didn’t know God. He pushed and tested, and she turned to break him. Water. Water in his eyes and throat and face. Drowning in the stream. And she laughed and smiled, a demon sent to torment him. If only she knew that it wasn’t her destiny.

Someday he would be the interrogator and explain to her how it all worked. It didn’t matter what one did while unawares. All that mattered was God’s ultimate plan, and he would lead her to it. But not today. Today he would die.

His last words were in service of the plan, but his last thoughts were of her. He stood, ready for death, and looked in her eyes. She had doled out pain under orders, but it was not hers. He saw compassion in her eyes, and through the glass he felt the meaning of her hand, pressed against his.

In the end, she was not the one who stole the air from him. He closed his eyes so that the last image burned on his mind would be hers. It would remind him that she was not fully unaware of her purpose in all of this.

ooo

“You failed,” Cavil said, as Leoben gasped through the liquid. Death had been simpler than this immortality.

Leoben didn’t know what words he spoke, his mind still trying to put the words in order, put the Hybrid’s thoughts into his again. He tried to remember his purpose beyond this chase and destroy. Cavil didn’t understand. He told Leoben of the rebellion down on the planet, Caprica. A resistance coming to fight the Cylons. Cavil could have destroyed the planet again, but he didn’t. He wanted Leoben to infiltrate them, lead them to their destruction.

It was Leoben’s penance for seeking out Starbuck too soon. Deprived of the Hybrid again, he was weak and shifty as he ran through the woods, the golden light like the face of God, too bright and dangerous.

None of the other brethren had been found out yet. The humans found him, athletes almost exclusively. Children of the gods, tall and bright and beautiful, and yet full of death. They welcomed him with the hard smiles of those who fight for every breath.

“We can’t really offer permanent sanctuary,” their leader told him. Samuel T. Anders. The face that launched a thousand magazine interviews, but Leoben had not given them mind until now. It was just a face, just a human face.

“I can help you fight from the camp,” Leoben told him, earnest and eager, even if he would not kill his brethren in person.

Samuel T. Anders grinned. “Absolutely.”

Leoben felt a shiver, as if he should know him, as if he should respect him. The resistance was not a legend among Leoben’s people, nor was Leoben as fascinated by the divinities of sports as Six was. It was just Anders.

He thought he might forget his fascination with Kara. Anders had the same belief as her, so small and yet at the core. Anders fought for something material, but behind every word his mind stretched beyond it. Leoben’s own devotion responded to it, and he watched and waited with intensity.

Cavil always berated him for forgetting his nature. Leoben could not continually grasp that he was only synthetic wires and programming, and in his faltering identity, something failed. The woman with the long red hair came back from a mission, dried blood streaking her hair like a tiger’s pelt at dusk.

“Toaster traitor!” she hissed, plowing Leoben into the dirt with a sharp strike to the jaw.

Leoben felt no fear, only the splitting of his lip as he lay in the dirt, spitting out the first taste of blood. It tasted like the human blood he had smelled. His synthesis was too accurate.

Anders approached the woman, voice tense and low. “Jean, what the frak?”

“We saw another one of him,” she said above his head.

Leoben rolled over, a smile twisting his face as he saw the guns pointed at his head.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Anders said, his voice low.

“It was with the chrome-jobs, on their side, and it looked just like him,” Jean said, voice breaking. “It found us first, killed Gunny before we had time to figure out. The Cylons look like us now.”

Leoben watched his face, saw the confusion and anger and frustrated shame. It was fascinating, and it was the torment Cavil wanted for all humans. Leoben wasn’t ready to lose all that yet, if he ever had been.

“You sure, Jean?” Anders asked, his voice steady as he stepped in a little closer. “It’s not a clone or a twin or...”

“Look at it!” Jean snapped, her voice breaking. “It’s not even trying to deny it.”

Anders turned his eyes on Leoben, still lying in the dirt. It was true. Leoben knew words wouldn’t matter in the end, so why start now?

But facing that gaze, Leoben first understood betrayal. And it was fierce and strong, and more than Leoben could take. In that moment he did not wish to face it any longer, and he knew that they would not kill him. Yet.

ooo

Anders was not trained in the art of interrogation, just had what he’d picked up along the way. And a heart burning for the safety of his comrades that he’d compromised by accepting a traitor.

“You know, if you’d only been an simple deception, we would have just shot you on sight,” Anders said, voice a low rumble

Leoben’s chest heaved after the physical pummeling, every rib hurting, one eye swollen shut. His gaze was sharp on Anders.

“But no, you machines aren’t the cold logical beings you might want to be,” Anders continued, voice empty of all but that hint of contempt behind the ease of his words. “You don’t justify your murder with anything. No, you embrace it. You enhance it, preying on us, wanting us to do your dirty work for you. Turn us against each other, get us to doubt the people guarding our backs. It’s not enough to kill, you have to make it mental.”

Leoben just listened, pain in all his senses, a glorious pain that he could have absorbed if not for the words. The words. He hadn’t come to bring them pain, but to do God’s will. Anders misunderstood. But Anders’ words still made the pain very real.

“Who programmed you to be sadists?” Anders demanded.

“We aren’t,” Leoben said, breathing coming with difficulty. “Sadists or programmed. Not the way you think. We aren’t what you think.”

Anders said nothing, just stared at him.

“We’re God’s children just as much as yours,” Leoben said, breathing out, looking him in the eyes. “We’re in his image, bear the spark of his divinity. What is the most basic article of faith? This is not all that we are. You swim in the stream, but whatever waits downstream, a part of you will be waiting onshore because you are more than this. You don’t say it, but what you do proves it. I know this, I feel it. I am more than just a body.”

“You swim in the stream, do you?” Anders asked, voice low. “You think you have a soul, maybe?”

“I know it more than you ever will,” Leoben said, a smile twisting his face again, at the irony that he could not fail to see. “I know that when I die, my mind, my soul, will rise again in another body.”

Anders mouth became almost a smile, tight and harsh. “Wireless networks aren’t souls.”

He didn’t understand. He wouldn’t understand. The questioning was over, and the pain returned. Pain for the sake of it, pain without remorse, pain to ease Anders’ own for the loss of some of the very few that remained. But Leoben wasn’t watching, detached and fascinated.

And as his body burned, inching towards death, he saw the bright light of humanity in Anders’ eyes and he began to despise it. Hate loyalty that would lead to murder of another, hate self-delusion to justify that murder, hate blind passion that decried God’s will. He had agreed to this notion that God’s plan needed the humans destroyed, but had not affirmed it in his heart.

But he died again, Anders’ cold blue eyes the last he saw. Humans had betrayed him twice over. And he affirmed the apocalypse of humanity.

ooo

He breathed in the air again, but his body didn’t feel the same. Cavil sighed, saying that one of the Ones had been sent now to do the job properly with the resistance. Leoben didn’t hear the words. The pain was phantom in his limbs. Perhaps this is what Kara had wanted to do to him? Had she been bound by law? Had he been a fool, thinking that he saw the capacity for eventual understanding?

But his own brethren, the Twos, did not understand. The Hybrid’s words like honey to their ears, and God’s plan what they strove for, even then they did not hate humanity. How could they hate a cog in the grand plan? Everything was so simple in their worlds.

Leoben knew he was different now. But different was not what they were supposed to be, and so he did not speak of it.

He sat by the Hybrid again, listening for the words that would explain why such darkness had to exist for God’s plan to bring light. The Hybrid spoke none.

“Lost sheep flying serpents, the dark shepherd will bring forth the dark lamb, show her face to the light, her purpose shining forth. She will be in his hands and know love, of this world and beyond.”

Somehow he remembered Kara again. Somehow he knew the Hybrid spoke of her.

And together they figured in the words, over and over. Leoben didn’t think of his pain or hate, only of destinies entwined. He had not failed his purpose yet, and he would bring her into the light so that she might see what she was meant to do. What she was meant to do with him.

Others spoke of Love, and the Twos agreed, and they headed toward the planet where the Colonial Fleet lay. Leoben said nothing. His only love was Kara’s, and it only grew as his destiny became clearer to him. If they entwined, if they fulfilled their destiny, only then would his love be complete. He said nothing, for his brothers could not understand how his desire to bring about destiny could be his only one. He was different, and the desire was all he had.

The planet was nowhere in God’s plan. Caprica and Boomer wished it to work; Leoben only wished to bring Kara to her destiny that was his too.

He walked the streets, looking for the signs from the Hybrid’s words. Even on this world, prophecy bore true and he found what he sought. Entering the tent, the light was shrouded, and he asked for his destiny. Kara was in this darkness, and he would lead her to the light.

But there, there. So insignificant, so near death. Samuel T. Anders. Leoben had thrust aside hate so that he might embrace destiny, but it lingered still in his every bone, in every bone that was identical but different to ones he had known. He saw that face again, and the contempt was still there, even as the man lay helpless.

Kara was his. The man who taught Leoben to hate, bound to the woman whose destiny was his. God was not supposed to be cruel like this, and Leoben felt his mind slip. His control faded, and his hate returned. Hate mingled with unfathomable love, and he wanted pain. Pain for Anders, and pain for Kara as she defied her destiny.

She could not deny it. His love for her and the way her destiny shone could not stand to battle against the hatred for what she avowed and loved in Samuel T. Anders. They spun in his mind, and he did not know how he made his choice.

But he forced pain and love in it together.  



End file.
